The saga of buying airline tickets over the Internet did not end with the $200-dollar lesson that I was previously given. Because we didn’t show up for our original flight from Little Rock to Washington, we became a “no-show”. As I learned, that meant that our entire trip had been canceled by American. If you don’t show up for one leg of you flight, your entire itinerary will be canceled. So, when I logged on to try to check in for our flight tomorrow, that’s the message I received—trip canceled. That news caused me to tighten up quite a lot.
I called the American reservation desk to learn more about the rules. If you are a “no-show”, from that point forward, your tickets have no value. Ouch! I whined and whined and bitched. After the reservation clerk checked a few times with someone higher up (at my insistence), our tickets were reinstated. However, because we went from having a round trip ticket to a one-way ticket, we were charged a change fee. At first, the change fee was $54 for each ticket. But, I kept whining until I got that number down to $29.
On reflection, I concluded that there was no way to avoid a change fee if any change is made to an itinerary. And, of course, we technically changed our trip by not showing up for the first flight.
Another lesson learned.
